Five Energy Stories Worth Reading Today (7/9/15)

“George Osborne has infuriated green energy producers and campaigners with a £910m-a-year raid on the renewable energy sector by changing a climate change levy (CCL) at the same time as providing more fiscal help for North Sea oilfields,” says The Guardian.

“Facebook Inc. set a goal of running half its operations with clean energy by the end of 2018, and eventually expects to reach 100 percent,” reports Bloomberg.

“Of the $12.2 trillion that will be invested in the energy sector over the next 25 years, two-thirds will go into renewables. That money will make renewables 60% of all new generation,” according to Utility Dive.

The deceptive tactics of the world’s largest fossil fuel “are now highlighted in this set of seven ‘deception dossiers’—collections of internal company and trade association documents that have either been leaked to the public, come to light through lawsuits, or been disclosed through Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests,” says Union of Concerned Scientists.

“Florida’s Attorney General Pam Bondi is trying to stop a voter initiative that would allow state residents to buy solar-generated energy from their neighbors instead of the state’s big electric utilities,” reports Herald-Tribune.

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We agree with the conclusion reached by PV Magazine, that although growth in renewable power in the United States is increasingly driven by non-RPS factors, "[t]his does not mean that RPS policies are not important."

Here are some key points from a new study by the Brattle Group for NRDC, entitled "Advancing Past 'Baseload' to a Flexible Grid," which argues that far from being a problem, a higher share of clean energy is actually a great opportunity for a wide variety of reasons.

In sum, the future looks extremely bright for clean energy, and for cleantech more broadly. The question isn't whether these sectors will grow rapidly, but simply how rapidly they'll grow. On that, we'd argue that EIA is far too conservative (or pessimistic, if you prefer), while BNEF is quite possibly too conservative as well, although they appear to be much closer to the mark than EIA's typically bearish-on-renewables, bullish-on-fossil-fuels forecasts.

According to a new report by the Energy Storage Association (ESA) and GTM Research, the U.S. energy storage industry is on fire, having just "deployed 71 MW of energy storage in Q1 2017...up 276% from the 18.9 MW deployed in Q1 2016," and with a lot more growth on the way.

See below for video of Chris Brown of Vestas, keynoting the opening session on day two of WINDPOWER 2017, concluding today in Anaheim, CA. According to Brown, who is completing his tenure as Chair of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), the next five years will be the "best five years of your life" for the wind power industry.

But wind and other major cleantech sectors rely on distribution-only or distribution-mostly strategies that leave most of the marketing communications (“marcom”) power of these tools on idle. This year, we looked at why that happens. A few external drivers explain a lot.